His face hardens. “Let it go.”
I hold his gaze. “No.”
For a second I think he might actually answer me. Not fully, but enough to explain the strain I heard in his voice, the fear in Arkady’s face, the constant sense that the house is tightening around something no one wants to say aloud.
He doesn’t.
He only says, “Go back to your children.”
I glare at him for another second, then turn away.
The twins are exactly where I left them, standing beneath a horse portrait that does, admittedly, look slightly constipated.
Sofia runs toward me the moment she sees me. “You took forever.”
“It was two minutes.”
“To you,” she says solemnly. “To me it was years.”
I take her hand and look back once toward the study. The door is shut.
My father does not come out again.
Arkady is gone.
I take Sofia’s hand and start walking again, but my mind is nowhere near the hallway.
It’s back with Roman.
Not only because of my father and whatever game he’s playing now. Not only because Arkady walked out of that study looking as if someone had quietly shown him the edge of his own grave. It’s Roman himself, the fact of him, lodged in my head in a way I can no longer pretend is temporary.
I had not expected that to matter as much as it did. I had not expected the terrible tenderness of it, or the way it followed me afterward, sitting under my skin like heat I could not quite cool down. I spent years telling myself I ran because I was frightened of what he was.
Now I’m starting to understand that I also ran because I was frightened of what I might become if I stayed.
“Mama,” Sofia says, swinging our joined hands, “if the horse painting had a wife, would she be happy?”
“No,” Nikolai says before I can answer.
Sofia rolls her eyes. “You’re boring.”
Nikolai turns from the window and looks at me. “Mama?”
There is nothing unusual in his tone.
That’s what makes my stomach tighten.
“Yes?”
He hesitates just long enough to tell me this matters. Then he asks, “Do we have a father?”
The room goes still. Even Sofia looks up from the rug.
I don’t move.
For one second, maybe two, I just sit there looking at him, and the question opens something in me I have been holding shut for almost five years now.
I always knew this moment would come. I just never imagined it would be so simple. As if he has already noticed the shape of the absence and is only now checking whether it’s real.